I’ve already downloaded your version of “Flight” and remade my changes to it, so that wasn’t a big deal. I… think I’ve brought my version of the merge folder back up to date. I’m not sure, though – did you check my latest commit? Github is confusing and it’s 5am ETZ so I could easily be missing something.

The fog script I was referring to was the above-water fog, BTW – the media fog looks great.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

still didn't really get to look at anything with any care, though I've been kinda running around the starts of some ch3 levels just to look at textures in action

(speaking of which, I think these ch3 levels are a lot harder than they used to be. even kindergarten is lethal. could something about the Defender physics have changed unintentionally? could someone compare to 1.1 and see?)

so I updated these today

also toned down the bump map on these like I thought I should

I might try to work out a way to get the color scheme of these to resemble the color scheme of the old metals more somehow, though messing around that before was not turning out satisfying results.

and I think I may just go back to the old version of that first hex texture (the indoor one) before I made it more square, because it just looks awful anywhere it's used on a large surface, like a fucking wall of clocks or something, and it really wasn't tiling so badly the way it was before.

side note: Let Sleeping Gods Die has to be the most hideously textured level in the goddamn game and that's probably all my fault.

Were the S’pht’Kr bolts guided in the original? Now that I think about it, I’m almost certain they weren’t. I didn’t double-check (I’ll have to go find a version of 1.1 and unmerge it, which I will do tomorrow as at present I haven’t slept more than about three of the last forty hours), but I thought the levels seemed way harder than I remembered them; that’s probably 90% of why. Should I uncheck the guided projectile box for their bolts in the level physics?

Those textures are gorgeous, BTW.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Was it just the first three levels of the chapter where the S’pht’Kr were hostile? In any case, none of their bolts in those levels should be guided now. I also submitted a few changes for “Pfhor får lamm”. I haven’t had time to really look properly at the platforms in any of the later levels yet. Maybe I will today. Let me know if you got the latest PR and if there are problems merging anything in.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

It’s because of “Flight of Icarus”, isn’t it? I don’t know why I keep having such trouble with that one level; I think Lia’s right that Github just doesn’t like two people working on the same binary file at around the same time. In any case, I’m sure the version I put in should have a more recent modified date than the version in the current branch. There’s probably something I can do to resolve the conflict, but I definitely don’t understand what. Would it be easier for me to just upload my version offsite and then you can place it in yourself?

ETA: Removing the guided flag seems to have fixed most of my complaints about the levels being unfair during scratch starts, BTW, at least if my journey through “S’pht’ia” on TC was any indication. I had very little difficulty. I’d upload a film, but it’s probably pretty boring, because there’s a lot of slow segments with retreating to rechargers/pattern buffers and fist-punching enemies slowly to death.

I still think the “invisibility MacGuffin” idea isn’t horrible if the goal is really the player to have as little an impact on the timeline as possible. Again, if my understanding of the time travel mechanics is correct, there really isn’t any reason Leela/the player can’t go find such a thing before jumping to Lh’owon’s past.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Story trouble with an invisibility thing is that there is no ship or anything like that that is time traveling with you, it’s just you personally, so you would need to pick up the whatsit yourself in chapter 2 somewhere if you were supposed to have it in chapter 3.

Wrt Github, did you merge the current version of master into your fork before re-committing your changes and submitted the PR? If not, then git will see that master haa changed since you forked it and the same files have changed in your fork and it doesn’t just use modification date to decide that your version should take precedence.

I agree that the player should pick up something somewhere to account for the invisibility, but I definitely think Lia has a point about the “leave no traces” nature of that part of the plot. I’ll have to replay the end of Chapter 2 to figure out what could be thrown in to explain it; I think I just got through “Burning Down the Corporation” in my current save, so that probably won’t take long.

And no, I haven’t. How would I go about accomplishing that in the desktop client? The commands are pretty confusing and don’t always map up with what I’d have expected. I guess it doesn’t understand that I’ve re-downloaded the latest commits and overwritten my old versions of the files.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Man wrote:And no, I haven’t. How would I go about accomplishing that in the desktop client? The commands are pretty confusing and don’t always map up with what I’d have expected. I guess it doesn’t understand that I’ve re-downloaded the latest commits and overwritten my old versions of the files.

I can see you still haven't pulled in the latest from Pforrest, it'd really help if you did that before you went and edited things. To do that through GitHub, remember it's basically the same as submitting a PR to Pfhorrest only you're submitting it to yourself from Pfhorrest. Once your remote is up to date you should be able to sync your local (if you don't want to use the web interface for uploading) with git pull.

Remember if you do any downloading it must be done through git, git sadly will not recognise anything you download through your browser.

Argh. That was a pain. Hopefully it actually works, though I’m not 100% certain that I did everything required, because the instructions are confusing.

edit: It doesn’t look like it; it’s still saying it has conflicts that must be resolved. I give up trying to figure it out tonight. I’m half tempted to make a second fork, but I expect the same problems will recur.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Here’s my latest run through “Flight of Icarus”. I’m still tempted to change the first couple of troopers to fighters, but I’m waiting to see what other people say about that idea. Apart from that, I can’t think of any other obvious revisions to the level to make for the time being, so I don’t know if I’ll make any further changes.

One interesting point of this video: I had absolutely no idea how dangerous Enforcers could be underwater on TC, so there’s one point where I literally get reduced to so little health that you literally can’t even see the bar; I suspect I must’ve had one hit point. Somehow I manage to complete the level anyway. Despite that, I think this is probably my best run through the level, and it’s almost certainly my shortest. I could still shorten it further; there were a couple of moments where I lost my train of thought, and I spent a lot of time just wandering around making sure the automap was as complete as possible.

There’s also an odd point where a trooper gets stuck on a switch polygon (around 6:40). I’m not sure if that polygon was marked monster & item impassable; if it was, it’s probably a path building problem. Marathon is dumb about monster paths when a supposedly inaccessible polygon overlaps with the monster’s shortest possible path. I don’t recall how to fix the problem without changing the geometry, or if it’s even possible to do. I might play around with it some more later, but I’m about to go bowling (insert your favourite Big Lebowski clip here).

Edit: We got delayed, so we haven’t gone bowling yet. Here’s the problem, explained as best as I can without a proper image editor (I can’t use Photoshop at the moment as Aleph One is still encoding a film on my PC, and switching tasks messes up the encoding). The current set of polygons looks like this.

The problem here is that Marathon builds monster paths by looking at the midway point between each line of a polygon. As you can see, the shortest path here directly overlaps with the switch polygon. A possible solution would be to alter the corners of the platform like so:

Now the shortest path no longer overlaps directly with the switch. But, of course, this alters the geometry and will probably look awful. I’m hoping that by simply moving the corners of the platform slightly (i.e., by about four points), the monster will no longer travel onto the switch. The alteration to texture alignment and geometry should be almost imperceptible, but hopefully this will stop the monsters from wandering onto the switch polygon. I’ll try altering the X coordinate from 20480 (which it has in the first image) to 20477 (when in doubt, use as many 7s as possible, especially in Eternal) and see if that fixes the problem.

One other possible solution would be to make the horizontal lines of the switch polygon solid, but Marathon monster paths sometimes ignore solid walls, and it wouldn’t be possible to punch the switch from that angle. Regardless, the southern wall of the switch probably should be solid, since it doesn’t have any transparent space. I’ll make that change as well.

I’ll also see if I can push these changes to Github. I’m still considering making another fork of the entire project, but I’m still not sure if that would solve my editing issues.

Edit 2: I submitted a commit to my fork but I can’t seem to submit it to Pfhorrest’s project. I’ll figure it out later – we’re really heading out this time.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Man wrote:there’s one point where I literally get reduced to so little health that you literally can’t even see the bar; I suspect I must’ve had one hit point.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that players and active monsters vitality are not integer values, and random damage can leave one with an infinitesimal amount of health.

The Man wrote:There’s also an odd point where a trooper gets stuck on a switch polygon (around 6:40). I’m not sure if that polygon was marked monster & item impassable; if it was, it’s probably a path building problem.

Both are are correct. The switch is indeed not marked as impassable, but even so that elevator is not up to Pfhor building codes. I believe this elevator would be monster-path compatible, at least geometry-wise:

elevator.png (4.72 KiB) Viewed 2645 times

Set the switch to activate any one, and have all three set to activate adjacent, doesn't activate parent, can't deactivate externally, and activated by aliens. I'm honestly not sure whether a path will build across multiple platforms though.

I prefer not to split up platforms unless it’s necessary, because that creates its own strange behaviours when a player/monster moves from one falling platform to another, but I certainly will if I have to, since it’s less disconcerting than having a monster on a switch poly. I’ll try the subtle point alteration, solid line, and monster & item impassable polygons first, and if that doesn’t fix the problem, I’ll split the platform.

(I don’t know why I didn’t even bother checking if that poly was monster & item impassable before leaving, so thanks for pointing it out. Was it like that in “My Own Private Thermopylae” too? Weird.)

ETA: Well, shit. Something I did created a motion glitch for the player instead. Not sure if it was the solid line or slightly moving the polygon boundaries, but I’m going to guess the former. I’ll try undoing it, I guess.

Edit 2: Undoing the solid wall fixed the motion glitch, but now the troopers get stuck even more conspicuously. That’s dumb. I’ll try moving it several more points before giving up and splitting up the platform.

(I’m also going to more or less double the platform speed while I’m at it, and change it to a S’pht platform so it actually plays some kind of sound.)

Edit 3: Moving the points by up to 20/1024 WU didn’t fix the motion glitch, but I’m half-tempted to just make the polygon leading to the platform monster & item impassable and bypass the whole glitch. Is there any reason the troopers need to get from one floor to the next? I can’t think of any. The platform isn’t currently activated by aliens anyway.

I think I am going to make the first two troopers into projectile fighters, as well. (I may counteract this by adding a few more of them, or of some other enemy, near the start.) Even knowing strategies to survive the opening, I still die in the first second after loading the level about 10% of the time, which is a bit of a cheap start. Or should I just move the troopers back further? I can see arguments in favour of either. For the time being, I’ve changed them to fighters, but someone can try moving the troopers back if they like that more. I’ll push the latest commit to my branch soon and see if I can push one to Pfhorrest’s later tonight.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I don’t usually have trouble with them (10% might’ve even been an exaggeration; it might be less than 5% given how often I’ve play-tested this level by now), but I know they’re coming; it seems like it’d be a rather cheap death for someone who didn’t expect them. It’s not the grenades that usually kill me; it’s the bullets. Maybe that’s what I get for playing aggressively and trying to make them kill themselves, though.

I think I’ll go with making the area inaccessible, but I noticed another glitch involving the upstairs Hulk this time - it somehow got knocked down to the lower floor and got stuck. It might’ve been the fighters that did it. I’ll watch the replay while it encodes and try to figure it out.

I also noticed something I’d never noticed before in “The Land in the Sky” - rather than describe it, I’ll allow the video to speak for itself when it’s there. I thought it might be a mistake but it’s apparently in all the “success” dream levels.

No idea on the Github thing. I followed the instructions it said to use on the command line and it no longer gives me warnings when I update my own fork, but it now does a bunch of other stuff I don’t entirely understand and I can’t seem to figure out how to submit a PR to Pfhorrest.

BTW, do you know the maximum height from which a player can swim out of a liquid in normal gravity? I may want to alter the height of the media slightly so that the player can always swim out when I’m really bored and feel like editing 40-some different liquid definitions.

ETA: I think I’ll try teleporting the troopers from 1 WU above ground level to give the player a slight head start. After I encode the video, though.

edit 2: here’s the video. I may or may not enact the other changes I described (apart from raising the opening Troopers) later tonight; I may just end up going to bed fairly early so I don’t start the work week ridiculously tired.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Did the physics in “Pfhor får lamm” somehow get messed up, too? I haven’t been able to get the Hulks to fight the Pfhor even if they take friendly fire, which seems a bit contrary to the rebellion that’s supposed to be going on. I’m not even sure if they should be hostile to the player, but they are. Video uploading now; hopefully it’ll finish while I’m AFK. (It’s 67% finished, so hopefully, but sometimes my computer goes to sleep and stops uploading to YouTube.)

The Hulks in the next level are also hostile to the player, which caused me a death because I didn’t realise it and they wound up surrounding me.

I don’t mind the new textures, but if you’re not satisfied with them, I expect you’ll come up with something better.

I’ll try to figure out how to get my PR to submit tonight. I’ve also added a new segment to “Third Rock from Lh’owon” based on the unused line segment; I suspect someone more familiar with Eternal’s textures can improve the texturing, though.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Sorry I haven't been replying to other people, I'm just so exhausted I can barely keep the texture project going. Aaron, the Hulks are supposed to be hostile to the Pfhor throughout chapter 4 and to the player for the first three levels of it, so if that's not the case and you want to fix it please do so! The new sections of Third Rock sound good too.

Tonight I updated these two textures:

And in the process adjusted the base metal texture, so all these got updated along the way:

All of that looks great; those are definitely the best versions of each of those textures to date. And it’s fine; I kinda figured that might be what was going on. I haven’t been too active this week, either – the end of each work cycle is always pretty exhausting. Unfortunately, this is our last (Sling TV and similar systems have basically made the entire TV diary program incapable of providing accurate information on TV viewing habits, rendering my entire branch of the company superfluous), so I’ll be out of work after next week, though that does mean I’ll probably have more free time until I find another job. (On the other hand, I’ll also be going on vacation starting the 23rd, so while I’ll be able to respond to messages here, I probably won’t be able to work on anything game-related at all from then until I return.)

I’ll try to figure out how to submit the pull requests properly this weekend, hopefully without messing anything up this time. I’ll probably have a bunch of new changes; I expect I’ll have time to go through more of chapter 4 than just the first level as well.

I’ll have to figure out what’s up with the physics, too, but I definitely couldn’t see any evidence of the Hulks fighting the Pfhor in any of my playthroughs of “Pfhor får lamm”, so I think that may have gotten messed up, too. That level seemed pretty easy even on TC despite the messed up physics once I figured out the correct strategy, but “The Incredible Hulk” seemed almost impossible on my first attempt, so I thought something might’ve gone awry.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Those look great, especially the wood. I’m sure the logo will improve further once you’ve worked on it more.

I’ll try to figure out the pull request process properly within the next few days. I want to make sure I submit them in a way to avoid future conflicts, because they’re really annoying.

“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” —V, V for Vendetta (Alan Moore)

“The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.” —Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”

“If others had not been foolish, we should be so.” —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I like the look of that last batch of textures. Also, I'm interested in seeing what you did with that room I couldn't add to Third Rock, I can't believe I made that so long ago that the polygon limit was still in place.